This is Part One in a series of five posts about real librarians who are completely and utterly badass. We at This Blog Rules are looking at you, and we’re thinking, “This reader looks like he hasn’t read a book since 1995. Well fuck him. If he can’t get his ass to a library every couple of decades, we’ll bring the library to him — except without the dust and that homeless dude rolling his daily cigarettes in a corner study station.” Thus was born this series. We hope you enjoy it.

Librarians come in three popular flavors:

Boner-inducing, dust-farting and Noah Wyle.

That selection seems a bit limited to us. We submit for your consideration a fourth kind of librarian: the prodigiously indestructible-nadded.

And no, we’re not talking about Conan the Librarian. He’s fake by two degrees. We’re talking about real, live librarians whose testicles or ovaries could balance the Encyclopedia Britannica on the Scales of Justice.

History is studded with librarians who thumped their hefty baby-coders onto the proverbial chopping block in the name of truth, justice, the church, poor people, gay people, and the right of all people to upend a urinal and make everyone call it art.